Astrophysics

A magnetic solar ‘heartbeat’ beats deep down in the Sun’s interior, generating energy that leads to solar flares and sunspots. Solar flares and sunspots A solar flare is a large energy release in the form of a sudden brightening of the surface or the solar limb. The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms [...]

This is the first post in a series about types of galaxies; today, we’ll be finding out more about Seyfert galaxies. This galactic type has been described for the first time by Carl K. Seyfert in 1943, who noted that their central regions have peculiar spectra with notable emission lines. Basically, what makes them special [...]

A decade ago, American physics professor John Cramer released an audio file which made history: the sound of the theorized Big Bang that formed the universe. Now, armed with new data and more observations, Cramer has released a remix – an improved version of the universe’s first one hit wonder. “In general, there are no sounds [...]

I was always puzzled by the tentacle-like spiral arms some galaxies (including our own) develop; it just seems so counter intuitive and senseless, that most researchers agreed they are only transient features, which come and go in galactic history. But astronomers working at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claim that these [...]

ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope has found a star and a black hole that orbit each other at the whopping rate of once every 2.4 hours. Basically, the star orbits the black hole at 2,000,000 km/hr. The black hole here is 3-4 times heavier than the Sun, while the red dwarf has a mass just 20% [...]

Using the incredible  Planck cosmology probe astronomers at the European Space Agency have assembled a map of the “oldest light” in the sky – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that was thrown into space in all directions just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang and which is still picked up here on Earth today. [...]

To boldly go where no man has gone before: a spacecraft launched from Earth, Voyager I has pushed into the great unknown, leaving behind our solar system. For years, astronomers have been discussing about when Voyager will finally leave the solar system – and it’s actually pretty hard to draw a line and say that [...]

Despite all the magnificent advancements in the field, we are still in the infancy of our research on extraterrestrial planets, so it shouldn’t really surprise anybody if a new type of planet is found. Mysterious dense bodies outside the Solar System which have puzzled astronomers for quite a while may in fact be remnants of [...]

A pair of newly discovered stars is the third-closest star system to the Sun – the closest astronomers have found a star system since 1916. The discovery was made by Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. Both stars in the system are brown dwarfs – not exactly stars, [...]

Researchers have for the first time conducted a remote reconnaissance of a distant planetary system with a new telescope imaging system. Peeking at other planets Project 1640 is a dedicated high contrast imaging program at Palomar Observatory with the goal of obtaining images and spectra of brown dwarfs and planetary mass companions to nearby stars. [...]